paperpools

There have been genuinely religious Abrahamists, but only because they’ve somehow maintained the forms of personal-God religions while having in fact abandoned any such belief. Some people think that men like St Paul and St Augustine are exemplary instances of what it is to possess the religious temperament. It’s easy enough to see why they have this reputation as long as we stick to the sociological understanding of religion: both were brilliant monsters of egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, is about self.

This connects to a phenomenon that at first glance seems curious. If we take the term ‘morally worse’ as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those who have had some non-negligible degree of education, we find that people who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than people who lack them. Are the religious worse because they’re religious, or are they religious because they’re worse? The first direction of causation is well known, but it’s the second that is more prominent in everyday life. The religious (sociologically speaking) tend to be religious because religious belief provides them with a framework in which they can handle certain unattractive elements in themselves. In converts – those who take up religion without having been brought up in it, or without having previously taken it seriously – the correlation between religious belief and relative moral badness in the strictly descriptive sense (which is not incompatible with charm) is particularly striking.

Galen Strawson in the LRB on Mark Johnson's Saving God: Religion After Idolatry and Surviving Death

Sometimes when I do turn it over, the situation actually get worse, because that's God's plan for their lives. They may need the pain in order to learn and to realize the problem. They may have to get worse in order to reach out for help.

So, now when I turn a situation over and it gets worse, I don't have to rush in and try to "save" the day. I can sit back and say, "Go, God... do your thing!" Because I know he's got a better plan, and His plan is better for them than anything I ever came up with and He can put that plan in to work very nicely without my help or interference!

Al-Anon Topic: Control

Joshua Cohen has asked me to write a piece on Internet as Consolation for the Dalkey Archive's Review of Contemporary Fiction.

What about God? Well, he works in mysterious ways, as we all know. I already wrote a whole post about that here. Most likely, if you are feeling strongly called by God to write your story, and even if you feel like he's telling you in no uncertain terms to share the message with the world, it still doesn't mean God has promised you a commercial publishing contract. Because in my humble opinion, if God truly intends for you to share your book through traditional publishing, he'll also give you the talent and the persistence to become a good enough writer. If you're writing non-fiction, he'll give you the credentials and the platform to sell your particular book, or at least the drive and seriousness to make it happen.

Outcut.

But.

J'adore.

(more)

My dear dear friend Alex Frey has been telling me about the extremely fabulous Lisa, who does highpowered matchmaking among companies. He also tells me she loved The Last Samurai.

"She should find me an agent!" I say. "Tell her to find me an agent!"

Alex seems not to see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Lisa to match a great writer of our time with a great agent of our time. He says Lisa does not find people jobs.

Alex and I then have a conversation about God. Alex believes in the existence of God. I believe in the existence of Lisa. I also believe I know what would count as existence or non-existence of Lisa, and I believe I know what would count as evidence one way or the other. I do not know what is meant to count in the case of God. This seems too much like religion by tombola. Everyone pulls something different out of the tombola; what matters is not WHAT is pulled out of the tombola, the important thing is pulling SOMETHING out of the tombola. The important thing is to believe in SOMETHING. If the time spent in schools on English orthography were devoted to philosophy, might we see a world where as many people thought logically as now spell "receive", "separate", "siege" and "seize" correctly?

I remember a story about Bertrand Russell. Russell gave a lecture on the history of philosophy to a general audience, which included a reference to the cosmological theory that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle. Russell pointed out that the theory had a problem: what was the turtle standing on? An old lady at the back shook her head in violent disagreement. She came up to Russell after the talk. "You think you're very clever, young man. But it's turtles all the way down!"

When one deals with the publishing industry one finds oneself so often in the sort of discussion where "turtles all the way down!" is brought out in triumph. A hyperheadhunter, I think, might find a head which did not do this.